May unemployment rates increase across southwestern Michigan

KALAMAZOO, MI -- College students entered the summer job market last month only to find that many of their traditional seasonal jobs, such as in retail and restaurants, were already taken.

That tightness in the labor market, spurred by contractions in manufacturing, contributed to a substantial spike in unemployment across southwestern Michigan in May, the state's monthly labor report shows.

"In good times in the economy, students, before the even get out of school, they have offers in retail, restaurants, all those jobs that we know students get in the summer," said Leonidas Murembya, regional analyst for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

"But in bad times, all those jobs will have already been filled by other workers," he said.

May's "surge of summer jobseekers," as Murembya put it, pushed Kalamazoo County's jobless rate to 6.1 percent in May, up from 4.5 percent in April, and up from 5 percent in May 2007.

And Murembya predicts that June's report on seasonally unadjusted unemployment rates will be worse.

"We're going to see an even bigger jump when the high school students enter the market," he said, because there are fewer summer jobs for them, too.

Kalamazoo County's labor market has maintained one of the lower jobless rates in the state this year because job losses in construction and manufacturing have been offset by gains in service-sector jobs.

But with the loss of 1,100 manufacturing jobs in the county over the last year, Murembya said, there are just a lot more people in the labor market looking for any work they can get.

"What it's telling me is there are so many people who are looking for jobs that they're competing for jobs that are traditionally reserved for students," he said.